"Right now I'm sitting in this chair, flying through space in my car and I've been doing this for a year and it just dawned on me that we've been literally travelling for eight months in the last year and it's kind of crazy," he said.

"And it's a little dangerous, you know. This lifestyle has a way of creating fissures in a sense of reality. You can't keep up reality at home because you're never there, and you can't keep up reality in the present because you're always moving."

The Two Gallants' drummer seems to have reflected on his band's circumstances a lot. Or maybe it's just that he's especially thoughtful and honest when reporters ask questions. He and guitarist Adam Stephens make emotionally charged Americana, touched up with hints of folk and hard rock. It's enough to open up a line of questioning that gets a little personal. Add in the band's five-year hiatus and Vogel ends up doing a lot of talking about how it all feels.

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About that five-year hiatus: Vogel and Stephens, who have been friends since the age of 5 and making music together since 12 -- parted ways to work on different projects in 2008. Vogel said they never anticipated taking this many years off, but they knew they needed some space to grow.

Two Gallants. (Courtesy photo/Eric Ryan Anderson)

"The great part of a band only being two people is that it's only two people," he said. "At the same time, it's a double-edged sword. Being in that environment so much, it's a kind of marriage. I think you need a little bit of outside perspective, and re-approaching the old songs and writing a new batch, I hear that there's a new life in them, one that's not so different than before, but we were inherently different."

The Bloom and The Blight, which marked Two Gallants' return in Sept. 2012, reflects that state of mind. It's not different, but it's not the same.

The duo has always delivered more jagged sounds than what's expected of band categorized as Americana or folk, and this time, the emotional content felt rougher, too. In their years off, Stephens was severely injured in a car accident -- badly enough that he couldn't pick up a guitar -- and Vogel was dealing with a toxic relationship. It showed through on the record, and Vogel thinks it might linger in the new record they have in the works.

"I think, inherently with music, it's rooted in a certain sensitivity," he said. "I think that this new batch of songs is taking what we grew into on this last record -- it's kind of taking that and building upon that. I think that, inherently, those things are still there, probably, but it has a different direction. It's the next step."

Two Gallants' current tour wraps up in about a month. When the pair returns home to San Francisco, they'll start to dig into the new songs and, of course, take some time to process the year that just flew by.

"I think both of us are really kind of needing to be home, and I mean that in the best of ways," he said. "We're sort of on our home stretch of this American leg of the tour. It's good, you know. Traveling America is always a very mixed bag. It's not easy, but it's beautiful."

Boulder is pretty good at producing rock bands, and by "rock," we mean the in-your-face, guitar-heavy, leather-clad variety — you know, the good kind. For a prime example, look no farther than BANDITS. Full Story